Photoshop How To

Photographers often turn to Lightroom's HSL sliders as the first step in editing landscape and nature photos. But what do you do when this technique falls short? As you'll see in the tutorial below, there's often a better solution that's very easy to accomplish.

One of the first things most photographers learn is to avoid high ISO settings whenever possible. That’s because the more you crank up ISO, the more image quality tends to suffer.

The sky is  usually a critical element of nature scenes, landscapes, and many other photos you capture in the field, and here's what post-processing expert Matt Kloskowski says about this matter: "Before we can even work on the sky, we need to understand how to mask it before applying various tools and enhancements."

Just about all Lightroom users know that the software includes a variety of timesaving presets for creating numerous effects and quickly dupicating specific edits you made in the past. In addition to the built-in presets there are others you can download at nominal cost, and even create some of your own.

There are countess reasons you may want to modify certain colors in a photo whether it was captured indoors or out. Perhaps a landscape image looks really great, except for a dull or lifeless sky. Or maybe you want to change the background used for a macro photo to make it more complementary to the tones in the subject.

It took landscape photographer Mark Denney a while to get comfortable editing his photos using dodging and burning techniques. He admits that when he was a beginner, dodging and burning was something he often heard about, but always assumed was too complicated for him to try.

The history of photography and camera technology is littered with controversies about the “best” way to capture an image. For a while shooters questioned the value of autofocus, then there was a debate regarding the quality of digital images vs. those shot with film.